Rivers used Greer, the highway department purchasing agent, to buy twenty-five acres at the intersection of Johnson Ferry Road and Balloon Road. Lucille Rivers would later explain that they used Greer for the purchase in order to keep the location secret, guaranteeing some peace and quiet for the busy governor. On a Sunday afternoon, the governor and first lady met with D. B. Blalock, a seller of road-building machinery, to get a price quote for constructing a lake on the land. Rivers’s getaway would be in many ways similar to the weekend retreat owned by the imperial wizard. Blalock would later be indicted for allegedly conspiring with Rivers to sell equipment to the state at inflated prices without allowing other companies to bid.
The Rivers administration was from the beginning a free-for-all for state contracts, with many people, including the head of the Ku Klux Klan, getting rich. Much of the money was New Deal cash, designed to help the impoverished state of Georgia pull itself out of the Great Depression.
Rivers handed the imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan a license to print money, and print he did.
7
“Lord, I Am Dying”
When Ed Rivers became governor in January 1937, lynchings—usually the public executions of black people by white mobs—were on the decline in Georgia and the rest of the nation.
Tuskegee Institute, a historically black college in Alabama, now called Tuskegee University, tracked each lynching from 1882 to 1968. It found that in the year 1938, there were only six lynchings nationally, and the victims were all black. But that number was down from twenty just three years earlier, and it would continue to decline.1
One reason for the drop was that in the 1930s Congress was debating federal antilynching legislation. Southern leaders realized that in order to avoid federal intervention and the erosion of states’ rights, they would have to deal with the lynching problem themselves. The last thing in the world they wanted was federal investigators and prosecutors tromping around, intervening in the affairs of the southern states.
Ed Rivers was a staunch opponent of federal antilynching legislation, saying in 1938, “The southern states have shown an ability to reduce lynchings to almost the vanishing point. I believe if permitted to continue to handle the matter ourselves, we will entirely eradicate it.”2 It was almost always possible for state and local governments to prevent lynchings through the proper use of law enforcement after a black man had been charged with killing a white person. That meant protecting the black prisoner: transporting him to a different town until the trial if need be, guarding him very closely during the trial, then transporting him out of town following the invariable conviction, which usually led to execution in the electric chair. Otherwise, you would likely attract a lynch mob.
Those were often the grim choices of black men accused of killing white people in the South: instant death at the hands of a white mob or death in the electric chair a few weeks later.
There were court rulings, established case law, that could prevent a man from facing death in the electric chair in a mere six weeks. The U.S. Supreme Court had ruled in the case of the so-called Scottsboro Boys in Alabama that the systematic exclusion of blacks from juries, which was the norm in the South, was illegal.3
The Scottsboro defendants, nine black males, the youngest only twelve years old, were accused of the capital offense of raping two white women on a freight train in March 1931. The Supreme Court also ruled in the Scottsboro case that defendants in capital cases were entitled to legal counsel.4 In fact, it was questionable whether the Scottsboro defendants had lawyers at all. As the trial was about to begin for eight of the defendants, six days after they were indicted, the judge in the case asked if both sides were ready to begin. The prosecution said yes, but no one answered for the defendants. Finally, a local lawyer stepped forward and said, “I will go ahead and help do anything I can do.”5 The U.S. Supreme Court noted the casual fashion in which men facing the death penalty were provided with attorneys, and it ordered new trials. There were white old-timers in Scottsboro who grumbled at this, grumbled at the lengthy trials and delay of justice, lamenting that the “old way of the rope” had been replaced by the “newer way of the law.”6
None of the Scottsboro defendants would die in the electric chair, although several would serve lengthy prison sentences. And their lawyers had established clear case law from the highest court in the nation that other black defendants also could use to escape death.
But although the case law was clearly there from the highest court in the land, the problem was actually getting a death case before the high court. That required lawyers who cared—even if they were poorly paid public defenders, who would be willing to at least file an initial appeal of the inevitable guilty verdict by all all-white, male juries. And it then required someone or some group to put up the thousands of dollars to take the case to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The U.S. Communist Party had funded the Scottsboro appeals, as part of its effort to recruit southern blacks. The Communists upstaged the NAACP, which entered the case late in the game. The Communists made the most of this public relations bonanza, even parading the mother of two of the Scottsboro defendants through the streets of Moscow.7
That is what it took—an organization with deep pockets—to keep black defendants alive. But there was not much time, only a few weeks, to attract the attention of someone, somewhere. It was a life-or-death race with the electric chair, as two young black men from Georgia, Arthur Perry and Arthur Mack, would soon discover.
On the night of July 30, 1937, they were milling around the Columbus, Georgia, fairgrounds. One of the city’s largest employers, the Tom Huston Peanut Company, was having a company picnic with beer, sweet tea, Coca-Cola, and a barbecue. Employees and their family members began arriving around 7:30 p.m. Whites sat at tables inside a large exhibit building, blacks sat outside nearby. The festivities started winding down around 1 a.m. There was much leftover food and drink. There were tables and other equipment to be packed up. The company assigned Charlie R. Helton, a forty-eight-year-old white security guard and deputized Columbus police officer, to stay overnight and watch the stuff.8
Helton was a big man, five feet ten and about 280 pounds. He carried a pistol. He hired a young black man named Ben McMurray to stay with him that night and help him clean up and stand guard.
Neither Perry, nineteen, nor Mack, twenty-four, worked at the Tom Huston Peanut Company. But word spread in the nearby community that there was free food and beer.
“I heard there was a free picnic down there, a feast down to the fairgrounds,” said Perry.9
At the fairgrounds, Mack and Perry ran into McMurray, whom they knew.
As Perry and Mack chatted with McMurray, Helton walked up and brusquely asked McMurray, “What do these boys want around here?”
“They want some beer,” said McMurray.
So Helton gave one beer each to Mack and Perry, but with a warning: “You boys have to go now.”
They left, but returned a few minutes later with a friend named Shi, hoping that Helton would give or sell them more beer. They offered him a dime for a beer. But Helton was running out of patience with these young black men. They were turning into pests. He told them to “go away and not come back.”
Free bottles of beer had been passed out all over the fairgrounds in the aftermath of the picnic. Men were drinking some and putting other bottles in their pockets for later. Mack told Perry that he had stashed two bottles behind one of the exhibition buildings, a cattle barn. As the two men headed over there to retrieve the beer, Perry for some reason asked Mack if he had a knife on him. It could have been that Perry feared they might run into Helton, the angry security guard who had warned them to leave and not come back. Mack said no, he did not have a knife. But Perry said he was carrying one.
Helton was by then inside the cattle barn, and he heard noises behind the building. He told McMurray, his hired hand, “I will be back in a minute. I am going down to the lower end of the building.” Before l
eaving, Helton first switched off the lights in the building, leaving McMurray in the dark.
About two minutes later, McMurray heard Helton shout, “I thought I told you to get out of here.”10 Helton pulled his gun, fired five shots, then cried for help.
“Boy, boy, come here,” Helton cried to McMurray. “Don’t let them kill me.”
McMurray rushed to the back of the building to find Perry on top of Helton, stabbing him. McMurray pushed Perry off, then ran to a nearby house to get someone to call the police.
He then returned to Helton. “Boy, get me to the doctor as quickly as you can,” Helton said. “Lord, I am dying. Do something for me.”
McMurray tried to put Helton in his car to drive him to the hospital, but the security guard was too heavy for him to lift. A bystander arrived to help, and they put Helton in a car and drove him to the hospital. He died of sixteen stab wounds, “some in the region of the heart.”
Perry and Mack were both riddled with bullets, but survived.
Police took Mack directly from the fairgrounds to a hospital. He had four bullet wounds, one in each leg, one in an arm, and one in a shoulder. A police investigator, Bob Flourney, asked Mack, who worked at a Columbus textile mill, to name his accomplice. “I don’t know, Boss, what the Negro’s right name is but they call him Squash,” Mack replied. “He lives on Eighth Street somewhere, I don’t know where.”11
Perry, nicknamed “Squash” because of the light color of his skin, was arrested a short time later in a house near the fairgrounds and was also taken to a hospital with a bullet wound to the thigh.
Mack and Perry were tried separately on Thursday, August 5, only five days after the Saturday-night killing of Helton. Both defendants were still recovering from their gunshot wounds. A newspaper reporter described Mack and Perry as “crippled” from the gunshot wounds.12
They and their defense attorneys had less than a week to prepare for a capital case, with the defendants still in pain from their wounds. The U.S. Supreme Court in 1932 had made it clear in reversing the death sentences of the eight Scottsboro defendants accused of raping two white women that a defendant who could not afford a lawyer had to have one appointed for him. But the quality of that court-appointed defense was very much an open question.
Two white attorneys, W. A. Leonard and J. Robert Elliott, appointed by the court to represent Mack and Perry because they had no money to hire private lawyers, did ask Judge C. F. McLaughlin to delay the trial, saying they had not been allowed enough time to prepare the defense. They also told the judge there was “too much excitement and inflammation of the public mind over the tragedy” and that there were “rumors of mob violence.”13
* * *
There was immediate outrage in Georgia’s black community that Mack and Perry, even if they did have attorneys, should be forced to go to trial for their lives so quickly, and when they were still nursing gunshot wounds.
“It seems apparent that no adequate defense could be prepared on such notice and furthermore, that no defendants could be said to be receiving due process of law when they are forced to defend themselves in court while from suffering from gunshot wounds,” stated an article in the Atlanta Daily World, the city’s African American newspaper.14
The trial proceeded anyway.
The prosecution argued that Mack and Perry conspired to rob Helton, hence the question from Perry to Mack about whether he was carrying a knife that night. And the plural pronoun in Helton’s last words, “Boy, don’t let them kill me,” was, prosecutors said, evidence that Perry and Mack together had attacked Helton first.
But exactly who was the aggressor? It was impossible to tell.
McMurray heard gunshots first, followed by Helton’s yell, “Boy, don’t let them kill me.” Helton was the only man that night with a gun. Did he fire first, and were Mack and Perry merely defending themselves? But a stab wound makes no noise. Was Helton stabbed first before firing at Mack and Perry? There was no way to tell.
Why did Helton switch off the lights before walking to the other end of the cattle barn when he heard Mack and Perry? Why did he leave McMurray standing there in the dark? McMurray had no explanation. Was Helton staging an ambush of Mack and Perry?
“Helton is said to have seen them coming and to have turned out the lights and waited for them,” stated an article in the Atlanta Daily World. “When they came within range, he opened fire.”15
Mack and Perry were tried separately that Thursday, August 5, with the prosecution’s star witness being McMurray, who testified that he saw Perry on top of Helton, beating him with his fists or stabbing him with a knife, he was not sure which.16
The defense called no witnesses other than Mack and Perry, who both testified that Helton had indeed appeared with guns blazing before he was stabbed. “He [Helton] says, ‘I thought I told you all to stay away from here,’” Mack testified. “And he shot, and shot me in this leg and hit right up here above my knee cap, and I wheeled and he shot me in the arm and I fell and I fell down.”
If Helton had indeed fired first before Perry stabbed him, a jury would have been justified in ruling Helton’s death a justifiable homicide, in self-defense, or manslaughter, not murder. Georgia law clearly stated that if “the danger was so urgent and pressing at the time of the killing, that in order to save his own life, the killing of the other was absolutely necessary,” a verdict of justifiable homicide would be warranted. Or voluntary manslaughter could have applied if Mack and Perry had first been attacked by Helton, and the killing was the result of “that sudden, violent impulse of passion supposed to be irresistible.”
But Perry’s testimony was tainted by the fact that he denied stabbing Helton or even having a knife, even though both Mack and McMurray swore they saw him on top of the security guard. Perry lied and said there was a fourth, unknown person on the scene who was tussling with Helton.
The trial judge did not give jurors the option of deciding on any lesser charge than murder. And the court-appointed attorneys for Perry and Mack did not object to this omission. They did not even raise the issue of self-defense.
The jurors, all white men, quickly convicted Mack and Perry both of them of murder, with no recommendation of mercy. The jury deliberated only sixteen minutes before convicting Perry at 12:27 p.m.17 A capital trial that had started that same morning was concluded by lunchtime. Mack was convicted at 5:50 p.m. that same day. The jury deliberated only five minutes before convicting Mack and heading home.18
A newspaper noted that the quick trial of Mack and Perry “established somewhat of a record in local court circles, only five days having elapsed between the time of the tragedy and the time of the trial.”19
Both men were sentenced to die in the electric chair on September 3, 1937, slightly more than a month after Helton was killed.
The shortness of the trials and the fact that there were no defense witnesses mean that there is little left behind in the public record as to who Mack and Perry were as people, as human beings. In the press and the courtroom, they were Negroes, not men. In contrast, the trials of white “thrill killers” George Harsh and Richard Gallogly, who had highly paid lawyers, left behind detailed information about the two defendants: childhood experiences, college essays, even full-body X-rays.
* * *
Now the race was on to save Mack and Perry from a rapid death in Georgia’s electric chair. Mack’s friends and relatives scrambled to find an attorney to file an appeal. They found help at the NAACP headquarters in New York. A thirty-year-old black lawyer named Thurgood Marshall was named the NAACP’s representative on the case. He would later become the first African American justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.
On August 27, with the executions just a week away, Marshall fired off a telegram to Georgia governor Ed Rivers:
INFORMED THAT TWO YOUNG NEGROES CHARGED WITH KILLING WHITE MAN AT COLUMBUS, GEORGIA JULY 31ST WERE TRIED AUGUST 5 AND SENTENCED TO DIE SEPTEMBER 3RD. STOP. BOTH YOUNG NEGROES SUFFERING FROM GUNSHOT WOUNDS FIV
E DAYS AFTER CRIME AND SENTENCING THESE MEN TO DIE LESS THAN 33 DAYS AFTER CRIME OBVIOUSLY NOT DUE PROCESS OF LAW. STOP. STRONGLY URGE YOU AS GOVERNOR OF STATE OF GEORGIA GRANT REPRIEVE OF SUFFICIENT TIME TO PERMIT MOTION FOR NEW TRIAL AND INVESTIGATION.20
With the clock ticking, Rivers sent an indifferent, bureaucratic reply. “Prison commission has no record of matter mentioned your wire of yesterday,” Rivers’s office wrote.21
It was a complete snub. Rivers had the power to issue a stay and had often done so in other death penalty cases.
In fact, for numerous white defendants, Rivers would hold face-to-face hearings to decide whether they should live or die.
S. J. Wheat Jr., a white teenager from Cobb County, was convicted of shooting to death W. W. Capes, a seventy-eight-year-old white grocery clerk, during a holdup, one in a string of robberies.
“Yes, I shot him,” Wheat told the jury. “Why I did it, I don’t know. There was something wrong.” The robbery netted Wheat $11.20.
Five times, Governor Rivers gave Wheat temporary respites from death. The governor personally held a hearing to determine whether the young man should live or die. Rivers tossed the softest of questions to the teenager, but even with those, it was hard to see Wheat’s crime as anything other than a cold-blooded killing of an old, innocent man.
“You were surprised by the man in that robbery, weren’t you, and shot him?” Rivers asked Wheat.
“No,” said Wheat. “I saw him in there. I knocked out the window and I think he thought I shot at him then. I got scared. He could have shot me before I got away. I went in the door and shot him.”
Rivers then asked, “Why, with all the advantages and education and fine Christian rearing you had, did you commit these three holdups and shooting?”
Without Mercy: The Stunning True Story of Race, Crime, and Corruption in the Deep South Page 9